Tag: climate data

I uploaded an update to the R script I posted earlier to import data downloaded from WorldClim into GRASS. The main change is that it unzips and imports one grid at a time into GRASS, thus requiring much less free space on your hard-disk.

For my work I am spending much time finding spatial data including environmental, administrative and land use coverage data. I started to record links with short description and keywords in a simple table for future references. I tried out two online spreadsheet programs to keep my records; Google docs and Zoho. I decided to stick with the latter former because it allows me to publish tables on my webpage with filters and column sorting (edit: I switched from Zoho to Google docs, mostly because I am using Google Docs for other projects and rather keep my documents in one place). Continue reading “Spatial datasets on the web”→

I am currently working on the modeling of the distribution of different vegetation types and associate species in eastern Africa. In absence of more detailed climate data for the region, a great source of global climatic data is the WorldClim website. Besides the usual monthly temperature and rainfall data, it provides bioclimatic variables which are derived from these monthly temperature and rainfall values in order to generate more biologically meaningful variables. However, it only does this for the current conditions (interpolations of observed data, representative of 1950-2000) but not yet (?) for the future conditions (downscaled data from global climate model (GCM) output, IPPC 3rd assessment). Thus, I had to calculate them myself, which I did using GRASS GIS and R. Continue reading “Calculating bioclim variables in GRASS GIS”→